buildkite-agent start
The Buildkite Agent’s start command is used to manually start an agent and register it with Buildkite.
On this page:
Starting an Agent
Usage:
buildkite-agent start [arguments...]
Description:
When a job is ready to run it will call the "bootstrap-script"
and pass it all the environment variables required for the job to run.
This script is responsible for checking out the code, and running the
actual build script defined in the pipeline.
The agent will run any jobs within a PTY (pseudo terminal) if available.
Example:
$ buildkite-agent start --token xxx
Options:
--config value Path to a configuration file [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_CONFIG]
--token value Your account agent token [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_TOKEN]
--name value The name of the agent [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_NAME]
--priority value The priority of the agent (higher priorities are assigned work first) [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_PRIORITY]
--disconnect-after-job Disconnect the agent after running a job [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_DISCONNECT_AFTER_JOB]
--disconnect-after-job-timeout value When --disconnect-after-job is specified, the number of seconds to wait for a job before shutting down (default: 120) [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_DISCONNECT_AFTER_JOB_TIMEOUT]
--cancel-grace-period value The number of seconds running processes are given to gracefully terminate before they are killed when a job is cancelled (default: 10) [$BUILDKITE_CANCEL_GRACE_PERIOD]
--shell value The shell commamnd used to interpret build commands, e.g /bin/bash -e -c (default: "/bin/bash -e -c") [$BUILDKITE_SHELL]
--tags value A comma-separated list of tags for the agent (e.g. "linux" or "mac,xcode=8") [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_TAGS]
--tags-from-host Include tags from the host (hostname, machine-id, os) [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_TAGS_FROM_HOST]
--tags-from-ec2 Include the host's EC2 meta-data as tags (instance-id, instance-type, and ami-id) [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_TAGS_FROM_EC2]
--tags-from-ec2-tags Include the host's EC2 tags as tags [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_TAGS_FROM_EC2_TAGS]
--tags-from-gcp Include the host's Google Cloud meta-data as tags (instance-id, machine-type, preemptible, project-id, region, and zone) [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_TAGS_FROM_GCP]
--wait-for-ec2-tags-timeout value The amount of time to wait for tags from EC2 before proceeding (default: 10s) [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_WAIT_FOR_EC2_TAGS_TIMEOUT]
--git-clone-flags value Flags to pass to the "git clone" command (default: "-v") [$BUILDKITE_GIT_CLONE_FLAGS]
--git-clean-flags value Flags to pass to "git clean" command (default: "-ffxdq") [$BUILDKITE_GIT_CLEAN_FLAGS]
--bootstrap-script value The command that is executed for bootstrapping a job, defaults to the bootstrap sub-command of this binary [$BUILDKITE_BOOTSTRAP_SCRIPT_PATH]
--build-path value Path to where the builds will run from [$BUILDKITE_BUILD_PATH]
--hooks-path value Directory where the hook scripts are found [$BUILDKITE_HOOKS_PATH]
--plugins-path value Directory where the plugins are saved to [$BUILDKITE_PLUGINS_PATH]
--timestamp-lines Prepend timestamps on each line of output. [$BUILDKITE_TIMESTAMP_LINES]
--no-pty Do not run jobs within a pseudo terminal [$BUILDKITE_NO_PTY]
--no-ssh-keyscan Don't automatically run ssh-keyscan before checkout [$BUILDKITE_NO_SSH_KEYSCAN]
--no-command-eval Don't allow this agent to run arbitrary console commands, including plugins [$BUILDKITE_NO_COMMAND_EVAL]
--no-plugins Don't allow this agent to load plugins [$BUILDKITE_NO_PLUGINS]
--no-plugin-validation Don't validate plugin configuration and requirements [$BUILDKITE_NO_PLUGIN_VALIDATION]
--no-local-hooks Don't allow local hooks to be run from checked out repositories [$BUILDKITE_NO_LOCAL_HOOKS]
--no-git-submodules Don't automatically checkout git submodules [$BUILDKITE_NO_GIT_SUBMODULES, $BUILDKITE_DISABLE_GIT_SUBMODULES]
--no-http2 Disable HTTP2 when communicating with the Agent API. [$BUILDKITE_NO_HTTP2]
--metrics-datadog Send metrics to DogStatsD for Datadog [$BUILDKITE_METRICS_DATADOG]
--metrics-datadog-host value The dogstatsd instance to send metrics to via udp (default: "127.0.0.1:8125") [$BUILDKITE_METRICS_DATADOG_HOST]
--spawn value The number of agents to spawn in parallel (default: 1) [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_SPAWN]
--experiment value Enable experimental features within the buildkite-agent [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_EXPERIMENT]
--endpoint value The Agent API endpoint (default: "https://agent.buildkite.com/v3") [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_ENDPOINT]
--no-color Don't show colors in logging [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_NO_COLOR]
--debug Enable debug mode [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_DEBUG]
--debug-http Enable HTTP debug mode, which dumps all request and response bodies to the log [$BUILDKITE_AGENT_DEBUG_HTTP]
Setting Tags
Each agent has tags (in 2.x we called this metadata) which can be used to group and target the agents in your build pipelines. This way you're free to dynamically scale your agents and target them based on their capabilities rather than maintaining a static list.
To set an agent’s tags you can set it in the configuration file:
tags="docker=true,ruby2=true"
or with the --tags command line flag:
buildkite-agent start --tags "docker=true" --tags "ruby2=true"
or with the BUILDKITE_AGENT_TAGS an environment variable:
env BUILDKITE_AGENT_TAGS="docker=true,ruby2=true" buildkite-agent start
Agent Targeting
Once you've started agents with tags you can target them in the build pipeline using agent query rules.
Here's an example of targeting agents that are running with the tag postgres and value of 1.9.4:
To do this from uploaded pipeline.yml you would do:
steps:
- command: "script.sh"
agents:
postgres: "1.9.4"
You can also match for any agent with a postgres tag by omitting the value after the = sign, or by using *, for example:
To do this from an uploaded pipeline.yml you would do:
steps:
- command: "script.sh"
agents:
postgres: '*'
Partial wildcard matching (e.g. postgres=1.9* or postgres=*1.9) is not yet supported.
The Queue Tag
The queue tag works differently from other tags, and can be used for isolating jobs and agents. See the agent queues documentation for more information about using queues.
Sourcing Tags from Amazon Web Services
You can load an Agent's tags from the underlying Amazon EC2 instance using --tags-from-ec2-tags for the instance tags and --tags-from-ec2 to load the EC2 metadata (e.g instance name and machine type).
Sourcing Tags from Google Cloud
You can load an Agent's tags from the underlying Google Cloud metadata using --tags-from-gcp.